Clark Ashton Smith was born on this day (January 13) in 1893. His legacy lives on!

Happy 123rd birthday, CAS! (wherever you are)

Hail Clark Ashton Smith! The greatest painter in fantastic prose there ever was, alongside Jack Vance. I predict, CAS will still be read in a thousand years, ... if not all traces of our culture have been annihilated by then, God forbid.

He has really established a niche in weird prose, hasn't he?

He's like an exquisite jeweler--and I mean this not as an allusion to his "lapidary prose", but more to compare him to a very detailed craftsman with a fine sense of design and aesthetics.

Now HPL is more like Edvard Munch...an inspired artist with a certain consistent vision.

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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Sawfish Wrote:
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>
> Now HPL is more like Edvard Munch...an inspired
> artist with a certain consistent vision.


I think that is a rather bold, and interesting, comparison. Yes, I feel there is something there, a similarity in the emotional/mental catharsis. But I would say Munch was a more confused and neurotic individual than Lovecraft, who had better intellectual capacity to remain balanced. And Lovecraft was not expressionistic and rough like Munch with his artistic brush; and neither was he impressionistic, for that matter. I would say Lovecraft was a classicist, in the way he carefully used healthy and balanced literary tools to express his phantasmagoric imaginings in the most convincing ways possible. In fact, I think Lovecraft's prose is equally exquisite, well crafted and exact as compared to Smith's, but different in approach. Rather than painting the visual reality, Lovecraft described what happened right beneath the surface of manifested things - creeping his way (sometimes sweeping with skilled steps) only a few millimeters beneath the charged undulating surface - so, indirectly, he got the staple of forms too, in their very essence, for us to see. Smith also had this ability, to a certain extent.

My point was not that his specific view was like Munch's, nor his style, nor his psyche, but rather that he was: "...an inspired artist with a certain consistent vision".

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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